Alex

the need to rely entirely on the power of purpose, principles, and people was what brought Visa into being. It was no stroke of genius. It was plain old necessity.

Efforts to make information conform to archaic notions of scarcity, ownership, and finite physical quantity--concepts that grew out of the agricultural and industrial age--merely lock us into old mental boxes of constraint and exploitation.

I could think of no way to fully realize the concept by including merchants and cardholders as owner/members. The slightest hint in that direction raised a storm of opposition. We should have included them. Perhaps, with more time, tenacity, and ingenuity, we could have.

It came to me that forming and building NBI, or anything of worth, is much the same. It requires sound material, a good tool, a capable hand and, most important, a vision of things to come. It requires patience and persistence to pursue the vision chip, by chip, by chip, and willingness to change the vision as the nature of the material is

Educed behavior is the essence of leader/follower. Compelled behavior is the essence of all the others.

Making good judgments and acting wisely when one has complete data, facts, and information is not leadership. It's not even management. It's bookkeeping.

Nor is corporate power restricted to power over the employed. Global corporations now have implicit sovereignty over people throughout the world, since they are beyond the reach of any nation-state. [...] They do so by the simple expedient of bargaining one government against another for the claimed economic benefit of their presence.

Visa was a quasi-governmental, quasi-for-profit, quasi-consulting, [...] It was none of them, yet it was all of them. It was chaordic. In the strict legal sense, Visa was a nonstock, for-profit, membership organization. [...] The financial institutions that create its products were, at one and the same time, its owners, its members, its customers,

No part knew the whole, the whole did not know all the parts, and none had any need to.